172 Quotes About Epistemology

Knowledge is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers.

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.

Science involves the quest for knowledge. Any such quest, by necessity, involves some commitment to epistemology. The epistemology of irrationalism is fatal to all science because it makes knowledge of anything impossible. If a truth’s contrary can also be true, no truth about anything can possibly be known.

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

...it is inevitable that women will be victimized by the sciences and their technologies in a society such as ours where women have little power, where almost all scientific research is technology-driven, and here political issues are posed as requiring merely technological "solutions".

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.